This is a story about the ways in which, for worse and for better, all the world is connected. It begins in Orpington in Kent in 1999 with a phone call, and it ends nine years later in the eastern Congo, one of the most remote and hostile places on earth, with the opening of a school.
The phone call that began the story was made to the house of Ron and Pauline Friend, a couple for whom the term 'salt of the earth' might have been invented. Ron, a former commander of the City police force in London, was then semi-retired, working as a security consultant to financial institutions. Pauline was a stalwart of the church's amateur dramatics society, a part-time medical receptionist and still a full-time mother to her three children, though they were now grown up.
The phone call came one Monday morning from the then boyfriend of their eldest daughter, who had been watching the news. The news item was about a group of tourists on the border of Uganda and Congo who, on a trek to see mountain gorillas, had been taken hostage and marched off into the jungle by Hutu militiamen, the Interahamwe, on the run from neighbouring Rwanda. The Friends' only son, Martin, aged 24, was in Africa on a belated gap year, and that phone call was to make sure that Martin had not been in the wrong place at the wrong time.
Julia Friend wandered into the kitchen to ask her mother where her brother would be, and after that nothing was ever the same again. Pauline knew that her son was in Uganda, she had his itinerary etched in her mind, she knew he had been planning to go on the gorilla trek, one of the highlights of the tour. She knew immediately, too, in the way that a mother knows, that he was one of those that had been abducted.
Ron and Pauline Friend are explaining some of this to me as we are preparing to board a UN helicopter in Uvira, the easternmost town in what, over the past decade, has been the bloodiest place on earth. The Friends, in their pressed hiking clothes, are an anomalous couple in this semi-militarised place. Uvira is part of the lawless Congolese province of Kivu, which has seen the worst fighting in the most anonymous war of our times - one that has claimed the lives of nearly five million people. It is a conflict that has been fought among the armies of three countries, Rwanda, the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) and Uganda, and which has involved ever-changing tribal militias. The 'First African World War' is currently being prosecuted with most force by the renegade Tutsi General Laurent Nkunda, who with Rwandan government backing has vowed to protect the native Tutsis of the province from both refugee Hutu groups and the Congolese army. The war, which has displaced hundreds of thousands of people to the north of Uvira, was sparked initially by the mass exodus of hundreds of thousands of Rwandan Hutus; millions of innocents have been caught in the convulsions that followed. One of those innocents was Martin Friend.
Ron and Pauline have come to Uvira on a mission of sorts, one they are anxious not to describe as 'closure'. Waiting for the helicopter, they recall it took them three awful days to confirm their fears of Martin's death - the news was eventually conveyed to them by a Daily Mail journalist who knocked on their door (Martin's best mate chased him off up the road) - but they have relived those horrors every day since. The English-speaking tourists, 16 of them, were separated from the French speakers by the Interahamwe (on the basis that the British and US governments had 'supported' the Tutsis of Rwanda). Of those 16, eight were inexplicably released unharmed in the forest, and eight were murdered by guerrillas armed with clubs and machetes.
You didn't need to be a police officer of Ron Friend's experience to know that there had been little chance of Martin's killers being brought to justice. Investigations suggested over a hundred Interahamwe had been in what is called the Great Impenetrable Forest that night. No forensic evidence had been taken at the scene before the bodies were repatriated. Scotland Yard sent a couple of detectives to go through the motions - the FBI were far more rigorous and got close to a trial - but proper convictions, any retributive justice, were never likely.
To begin with, Ron and Pauline and their two daughters were bitter about that fact; they clung to each other, and to whatever other comfort they could find. They sat up long nights talking about Martin. 'There isn't a mother who has lost a son who wouldn't say this,' Pauline tells me at one point, 'but he was a special boy, he collected people. One of his friends said, "Do you know, Pauline, we never really felt the evening had started until Martin arrived." And that is how he was. He made me laugh all the time.' 'He had,' Ron recalls, with love, 'quite an evil sense of humour. He was a sarcastic sod, but caring, too. The number of people who described him to us as their best friend was unbelievable, a dozen or more people.'
One small turning point came for them some months after Martin had died, when Ron saw a documentary about the families of the victims of the Marchioness tragedy on the Thames. It was the 10th anniversary of that disaster and the families were still battling to apportion blame for the deaths of their children. Watching it, Ron called the family together. That should not be how the coming years would be for them, he suggested. They would not be eaten up by anger, they would find another way.
Ron was not sure what that way might be. He was disturbed beyond measure by the fact that in his grief he could not recall his son's face, or his voice: 'There was just a great emptiness.' However, of all the conversations he had about the terrible events in the jungle, one stuck with him. It was something that the tour guide who had led Martin's group had said to him at the inquest. What she remembered most about Martin was how excited he was about the prospect of climbing Kilimanjaro after Uganda; he joked about reaching the summit on the day that his beloved Spurs reached the Worthington Cup final, and of finding a radio so he could listen to their triumph on top of the world. Thinking about that, Ron made a resolution: he would climb the mountain in memory of his son, make a new connection with him; and so the journey to Africa began.
The Kilimanjaro climb took place in the millennium year. To help organise the fundraising side of it Ron approached a charity he had been involved with, Children in Crisis. ('We thought it was right,' Pauline explains, 'because though Martin was 24 when he died, he never stopped being our child.') Children in Crisis, founded by the Duchess of York, is run by Mark McKeown; it is dedicated, in an extremely direct way, to bringing education to children in places where generations have been lost to war or poverty. McKeown climbed Kilimanjaro with Ron and one of his daughters. The expedition raised £130,000; it also brought Ron back in touch with his son. It gave them a shared purpose.
Over the subsequent years, Ron and Pauline stayed close to the charity, working on fundraising, and all the time an idea was developing to create a lasting memorial to Martin. In 2005 McKeown talked of work he was embarking on in Congo, the result of a walking tour of the country's high plateau with an irrepressible local pastor called Samson. The more McKeown talked about those who had lived for a long time with the fallout of other people's wars, wars refuelled by thousands of Interahamwe refugees, the more resonance the stories had for Ron. With Pauline's support he decided they would raise the money to build one of four schools in Congo that Children in Crisis was planning. Over two years, through quiz nights and garden parties, sponsored walks and the generosity of friends and colleagues, they raised the £39,000 that was required to build the first ever permanent school building in a place called Mishashu.
To begin with, Pauline recalls in Uvira, she had reservations about the plan; she wondered whether the family should not just look out for each other, hold on to memories, close in against the world. 'I have to confess that I did wonder: should we be doing all this for people in Africa, which is where we lost Martin? But Ron and I talked, and he said these people have got nothing, they are brought up as victims, banditry is their only way out, and nothing is going to change unless they are educated to see there might be another life.' That faith in change is one of the things they have come here to test, and to prove.
Mishashu is a very long way from Orpington. But having raised the money for the school McKeown insisted that Ron and Pauline had to be there at its opening. Pauline did not think she could do it; her nightmares about her son were still too vivid. 'One of the hardest things for me obviously over the nine years has been to get the pictures of Martin's death out of my head,' she says. 'I have absolutely no idea if the pictures are true, but they don't go away.' Her anxiety has not been helped by the fact that the original school opening in June was postponed because the Nkunda forces in the area had been shelling the airstrip, and the one road, through the world's second largest rainforest, had been made impassable by unseasonal rains. But still, despite her fears, Pauline was here now, in Uvira, waiting for a helicopter.
The Democratic Republic of Congo is the size of western Europe. Uvira is as far from the capital Kinshasa as Moscow is from London. The high plateau is about as upriver as you can go, way beyond Conrad's Mr Kurtz country. Che Guevara was based up here in the mid-Sixties in his abortive attempt to spread revolution to Africa. He and 100 Cuban fighters were run out of the place by the government forces of Mobutu and the mercenary army of 'Mad Mike' Hoare. The place Guevara described in his diaries, however, is not much changed.
'Women here are treated as merchandise,' he wrote, 'objects to be bought and sold. Once purchased, a woman becomes the absolute property of the owner, or husband - who generally doesn't work. In the areas occupied by the Congo army many more women were raped, and more children were murdered. The farmers were forced to provide the soldiers with food and other services. And what were they offered? Protection: none was given. Education, which could be a vehicle: none was offered ...'
Forty years later Mark McKeown had seen such lives still being lived when he came up to the plateau for the first time with Pastor Samson; they took a walk together for 100 or more miles across the rolling plains that had become one end of the continent's biggest battlefield. Flying up over these plains in the UN helicopter, McKeown tells a representative story of the cattle-herding Banyamulenge tribe of Tutsi origin who, persecuted for decades, forced out by Mobutu, still live here. The women spend most of their days pounding maize. At a public meeting, McKeown wondered aloud about the possibility of getting a mechanised grinding mill so that more of the women's time would be liberated, perhaps for education. One village elder stood up to say that he had paid two cows to buy his wife, and had not done so to eat maize which has been ground by a machine.
One of the virtues of the school that Ron and Pauline's money had built was that it had been constructed entirely by the parents whose children would attend it. The parents - mostly the mothers - had carried the rocks and sand and cement and water countless hot miles on their heads. The women had made the kilns that fired the bricks that made the school. They had been paid for their work properly, and many of them were using the money in turn to pay school fees (US $10 a year, from which teachers would be paid). The project has been run here for Children in Crisis by Sarah Rowse, a Yorkshirewoman in her 30s, whose presence - developing proper training programmes for 400 teachers, instigating child-centred learning in places where there had been no learning at all - often in extremely dangerous circumstances, had been an inspiration.
It is one thing to hear about all this sense of pride and empowerment in a place where previously there was violence and helplessness. It is another, though, to see it first hand. As the helicopter comes in to land at Minembwe, the nearest village to Mishashu, where there is a small UN base, the flat plains are covered with hundreds of people, mostly children, running from all directions; some wave home-made banners, 'Merci Ron!', 'Merci Pauline!'. A group of five-year-olds hold up a placard that reads: 'Thanks to Mark and Sarah all your long walks have saved the future for thousands of our children!'
Things are improving here. Up until recently, 80 per cent of the population of the high plateau had decamped, many to refugee camps in Burundi, to escape the killing. Pastor Samson, who accompanies us, explains how the conditions described by Guevara still prevail, however. Unpaid soldiers of the Congolese Army live off the local farmers. The people have been subject to terror raids by the factionalised 'Mai-Mai' groups, some of whom douse themselves in oil in the belief that it protects them from bullets. Nkunda's army progresses from the north. In the Minembwe area the incidence of gang rape, the most chilling characteristic of the long war, is currently down to about one reported attack per week. North of here towards Bukavu there is still at least one reported case every hour; this, despite the presence of the largest UN force - 17,000 troops - in the world. Despair and hope, you quickly learn, never stop doing battle here; one follows fast on the other.
Hope is everywhere evident in the welcome we are given. Pauline and Ron, both tearful, lead a procession up the hill from the helicopter to the place where we are to stay; every child wants to hold their hand, check out the whiteness of their skin; every parent wants to offer thanks. Music is provided by a wandering trio connected by cables: one man holds a solar panel, the next a car battery, the third plays an electric organ. Eventually, when the singing has stopped, and the speeches have ended, we get a chance to take in our surroundings.
Ange's guest house, half a dozen rooms round a dirt yard, is as good as it gets in Minembwe. For Ron and Pauline they have pulled out all the stops: there are ancient blankets on the bunks. Ange herself has long gone, however, chased out by one militia or another. There is no water except that which must be carried from the stream half a mile down the road, and no food except boiled rice and chicken bones which Mark and Sarah supplement with tinned sardines and ferocious lime pickle. From sundown, at around six, there is no light and no sound in Minembwe. No fires in its mud houses, no music, little movement. The nights are long. One morning I woke early and, with a torch, came face to face with a large black rat next to me on my bed, chewing through the cover of Blood River, Tim Butcher's recent book about a journey up the Congo river. Morning is slow in arriving. For several hours before the sun breaks through, the whole plateau is sealed in a thick fog, which adds to its apocalyptic aura. Out of this fog men in the rough fatigues of the Congolese army, carrying AK47s, occasionally appear, trailing menace; sporadic refugees with bedding on their heads, who have walked from another place and time, trail across the valleys. The only lights to penetrate this murkiness are from the UN camp and a new South African mining compound - devoted to the improbable logistics of extracting gold from these hills (an activity that also keeps various militia groups occupied).
In this context, the school built at Mishashu is something like an intruder from a different world. There is optimism in each of its perfect right angles, and in its glass windows. Because the children had never seen white walls before, the whitewash was quickly covered in hand prints as the pupils tried to discover what magic might have created it. When we visit for the formal opening, the following day, it is a wonderful thing to discover that catchment areas have suddenly as much of a grip on the anxieties of parents here on the high plateau of the Congo as they do in any postcode of north London. Since the beginning of term at Mishashu, 40 families have moved into the area in the hope that their children can sneak into one of the 300-odd places at the school. Fathers have brought sons and daughters to lodge with friends and relatives in order to white-lie about their home addresses.
Ron and Pauline had therapy after Martin died, as a family, which was mostly, they say, an opportunity to cry together. The opening of the school is therapy of a different kind. They sit in the sunshine under a recycled UN tarpaulin, and listen to speeches from all-comers in translated Swahili. The village chief suggests with absolute conviction that 'since the beginning of colonial times, this is the first good thing that anyone has ever done for us'. There is cheering from his crowd. Sarah stands up and pays tribute to the women who did much of the work to build the school. She hopes that the school is a fitting tribute not only to Martin Friend, but to all those many thousands of lost sons and daughters who never had a chance in this place.
McKeown, looking squarely at the tribal elders, says that it is his belief that 'women always make so much more sense than men'. 'Work hard,' he says now to his audience of schoolchildren, 'build a better country.'
When Ron Friend himself stands up he expresses a view that has perhaps never been heard before in this place. 'I believe,' he says, 'that learning and schooling should be fun!' To this end he has brought six white shiny footballs and several bags full of balloons. To children used to playing with balls made of rags, the newness of these objects is revelatory. Much of the rest of the afternoon is spent watching the children chasing them, as if their lives depend on it, across the plateau.
I sit in the shade with the new headmaster and talk about what the school means. They had tried to keep some basic lessons for their children going through the worst of the war, he says, but they had no trained teachers, and those who taught were not paid. In 2002 the blackboard, benches, desks and doors of a mud-hut classroom they had knocked together were used for firewood by a Mai-Mai group; that makeshift school was destroyed; most of their families fled. Now they have teachers who are trained, and paid. They have teaching materials, 'a model of the digestive system! A skeleton!' that they can study. And they have this remarkable home-made building. We may, the headmaster says, who knows, one of these days, produce 'a doctor, a politician, a president'.
If the mood is one of celebration today, however, despair is not hard to find. I'm introduced to two men for whom Ron and Pauline's gesture is unbearably poignant. Ngirabaku Nzi Muharaba is 67, and has seen three of his 10 children murdered. He lists them solemnly: 'Mande, Muharaba, Cadeau, aged 16, 14 and 12.' They were killed in Bukavu, having left to escape the war here; murdered by Congolese soldiers, he says, just because they were Banyamulenge. Kenasi Runagana is 58. He has lost, he tells me quietly, five sons to the fighting. Rebels from Rwanda killed his children at refugee camps in Uvira. 'It is common,' he says.
When he thinks about his sons, I wonder, how can he still find a purpose for himself?
He thinks for a while and then through the translator he says, 'In my heart there is nothing.' He has no children of school age, but he wanted to come along today to show support for the idea of the school, for the idea of reconciliation. That Ron and Pauline should come all the way from England to do this for the memory of their son, he can barely comprehend. But in the school, he wants to believe, lies a possibility of change. 'For me,' he says, gesturing toward the brick building 'this can be hope.'
At the entrance to the school is a memorial stone to Martin. Pauline stands in front of it for a while, alone in a crowd of children. 'It was so unreal,' she says to me later, 'just to see his name in this place.' The thing about it all was, Ron suggests, in other circumstances Martin would have loved this day more than anything, kicking a ball around with 300 kids. On the memorial stone is an inscription from Nelson Mandela: 'Education is the best weapon you can use to change the world.'
If that day was all about hope, the next is all about fear. It starts early. We set off at five in the morning to visit two other schools that Children in Crisis is building in the area. The fog is so thick that one of the teacher trainers has to walk in front of the Jeep to make sure it does not plunge off the track. We pass a point in the road where a couple of weeks earlier a group of village women had been raped and murdered in the woods, a crime that is too common to investigate. Further on, a group of dissolute soldiers mans Point Zero, a notorious checkpoint. The soldiers, drunk or hungover, tote guns, but on this occasion wave us through. To get to the first school there is a walk of eight or nine miles across the hills, and because of the welcome we receive there, and because there is another school to see, we are a little late getting back on the road, and when we do, night has fallen.
The high plateau becomes a different place after dark. Once again we are lucky at Point Zero to be waved through without a bribe, but a little further on some teenagers have set up a roadblock at a broken bridge. The boys are drunk, and excited at the sight of a Jeep full of strangers; the exchange begins with smiles, but quickly changes in tone. Punches are aimed through the windows, and one of the boys, not much older than some of the children we had seen at the school the previous day, seems to raise a gun to his shoulder. In that moment the full force of the idea of being in the wrong place at the wrong time is brought home. Our driver moves away at what speed the dark and rocky track allows and for a long while the gang gives frenzied chase. In the seconds that follow, when every rut of the road offers lurching disaster and each bend might offer up a new roadblock, we begin to wonder what it might be like to live here; to travel these roads where a gun can make every boy a boy soldier.
Pauline leans her head on her husband's shoulder and talks for the first time of the need to be home. (Home suddenly means Ange's, and a stub of a candle in a black room.) When we do get back, the longest hour later, there is a welcoming party of villagers who have been anxious for our return. Some peace negotiations eight hours away - no one here talks in terms of miles, because everyone walks - have broken down; the Mai-Mai apparently opening fire on their opponents. The fighting is moving our way, some say four hours away, some say two, which, as we know, by now, in the context of this place, is a stroll in the park.
With this news, all of the images that Pauline had at the back of her head, of how her son was killed, are now very much at the front. 'It's too close to Martin,' she says. 'It's too close.' Assurance is given by the proximity of the UN base, in which a troop of the Pakistani army are billeted. It is nonetheless a long night. At one point there is the sound of gunfire that has me staring at the dark. I lie awake for a while with that famous quote from Conrad in my head: 'The belief in a supernatural source of evil is not necessary; men alone are quite capable of every wickedness.'
The next morning, we are due to fly out but the helicopter does not come, so we do what everyone does in Minembwe - sit and wait in the fog. If the weather does not improve we are faced with a drive of 24 hours through the forest, partly on the road we had just about navigated the previous night. While we wait, we talk, about the fighting, about teacher training, about the uses of theatre in education up here. Pastor Samson, with his ministry Eben-Ezer, has instigated a process of reconciliation on the plateau. At the first mass meeting 11 years ago, after another tentative peace had been negotiated, thousands of people from warring factions turned up. It was a biblical scene. The plane carrying a delegation from Jerusalem, however, that was to lead the gathering, crashed into the mountainside killing the 20 people on board. The plane's wing still does service as the main bridge across a river. Pastor Samson had been due to be on the plane but had given up his seat at the last moment. He had taken it as a sign that his work must continue.
The schools programme has become the vital part of that reconciliation process. One of the teacher-training programmes delivers 'lessons in peace', exploring the possibility of breaking the cycle of violence and retribution that has been the way of life here for longer than anyone can remember. Ron and Pauline stop short of talking about forgiveness for the death of their son. They see the school as one way of preventing their hearts hardening against Africa. But here their gesture is clearly taken as a lesson in reconciliation, perhaps even as a contemporary parable. 'I got that feeling,' Ron says, 'that it is not just a school but a turning point.' It sounds a fragile hope, but it is the best one around.
While we talk, news arrives from Samson of one of the fathers from Mishashu who has been shot and killed by Congolese soldiers the night before. The man had been asked to get the soldiers food, and because he was slow, or because he stopped to put on his shoes, or just because, he was killed kneeling down outside his house, while his children, who had, perhaps, that afternoon been chasing balloons across the plateau, looked on.
In the absence of newspapers or television the people of Minembwe rely on what they call Radio Mouth, the gossip that tells them day-by-day whether fighting is moving toward them, or away. At Ange's, though, Pastor Samson fiddles with his real radio in order to try to get some local news. All he gets through the static is a speech from George Bush. It is the anniversary of 9/11. 'Freedom and fear are even now at war in the world,' Bush declares. In the eastern Congo you don't for a moment doubt it.
The following day, our prayers are answered: the fog lifts, we are airlifted out by the UN helicopter. I've just finished Butcher's rat-chewed Blood River. Congo, he concludes, is the ultimate example of the triumph of despair over hope. Over the plateau, the most fragile of safe havens from the most unrelenting of wars, with the brick-built school of Mishashu in the far distance, three more schools nearly completed, and Ron and Pauline Friend on their way back to Orpington, it is tempting to believe that there might still, however, even in this place, be one or two exceptions to this rule.
Children in Crisis (020 7627 1040; childrenincrisis.org)